Reframing Holocaust Testimony

268 Pages·2015·5.408 MB·English

by  Noah Shenker

REFRAMING
HOLOCAUST
TESTIMONY
The Modern Jewish Experience
Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors
Paula Hyman, founding coeditor
REFR AMING
HOLOCAUST

TESTIMONY
NOAH SHENKER
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2015 by Noah Shenker
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on
Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shenker, Noah [date] author.
Reframing Holocaust testimony / Noah Shenker.
pages cm. – (The modern Jewish experience)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01709-3 (cloth : alkaline paper) — 978-0-253-01713-0 (paperback :
alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01717-8 (ebook) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—
Influence. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Study and teaching—Audio-visual
aids. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Social aspects. 4. Oral history—Audio-visual
aids. 5. Video recording—Influence. 6. Interviewing—Technique. I. Title.
D804.3 .S557 2015
940.53/18075
2015004496
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
In Loving Memory of David M. Shenker, MD
1942–2012

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Testimonial Literacy 1
1. Testimonies from the Grassroots: The Fortunoff
Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies 19
2. Centralizing Holocaust Testimony: The United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum 56
3. The Cinematic Origins and the Digital Future
of the Shoah Foundation 112
4. Telling and Retelling Holocaust Testimonies 151
Conclusion: Documenting Genocide through
the Lens of the Holocaust 192
Notes 199
References 229
Index 239

PREFACE
In February of 2007 I accompanied Joan Ringelheim, then the director of the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s oral history department, as she set
out by car from Washington, D.C., to a quiet residential neighborhood in Vir-
ginia. There, at the home of a cameraman with whom she had worked several
times before, Ringelheim prepared to interview Sarah Z., a Polish Jewish sur-
vivor of the Holocaust.1 The comfortable domestic space appeared to put Sarah
at ease immediately upon her arrival. The living room had been set up as a re-
cording studio, complete with sound padding and a black backdrop. The base-
ment den housed a monitor for Ringelheim’s assistant, Elizabeth Hedlund, who
took notes that would later be used for cataloguing the testimony. As the video
camera ran, Sarah was composed in recounting stories of having grown up in a
small apartment in Warsaw and describing her family life and the celebration of
Jewish holidays, all of which were disrupted by Germany’s invasion of Poland.
In the midst of watching her recount her wartime events, we paused for
coffee and pastries. During that intermission, Sarah spoke with much more ani-
mation about her personal history and her experiences recording the interview
with Ringelheim, me, and the crew members, remarking that her memories
“stay with you all the time.” Her recollections of the Holocaust were not com-
partmentalized, only to be revealed at the start of the recorded testimony, but
were entangled elements of her life. Later that day we took another break, this
time for lunch. Gathered around the table, Sarah recounted in fuller detail, com-
pared to her video testimony account, her son’s car accident as a young man, his
subsequent paralysis and eventual death a decade after the incident, and the un-
bearable pain of burying her own child. Her fluent on-camera performance of
the relatively insulated experiences of her wartime childhood contrasted with
her less polished and more destabilized expressions of grief off-camera as she re-
counted to us the story of her son’s death. For Sarah, her process of giving testi-
mony not only concerned reconstructing events taking place during the Holo-
caust, but also engaged with her own personal forms of remembering that went
beyond the wartime era. Whereas she was controlled and confident on-camera,
she lost her composure when facing, off-camera, the challenges of her postwar
family history.
ix